[syspec]

According to the report, 52% of all open-source AI is used for *roleplaying*. They attribute it to fewer content filters and higher creativity.

I'm pretty surprised by that, but I guess that also selects for people who would use openrouter

[IMTDb]

Or maybe it’s just strange classification. I see a lot of prompts on the internet looking like “act as a senior xxx expert with over 15 years of industry experience and answer the following: [insert simple question]”

I hope those are not classified as “roleplaying” the “roleplay” here is just a trick to get better answer from the model, often in a professional setting that has nothing to do with creative writing of NSFW stuff

[CJefferson]

I can't be sure, but this sounds entirely possible to me.

There are many, many people, and websites, dedicated to roleplaying, and those people will often have conversations lasting thousands of messages with different characters. I know a people whose personal 'roleplay AI' budget is a $1,000/month, as they want the best quality AIs.

[susanthenerd]

OpenRouter classifies content by the app that's used to interact with the llm. https://openrouter.ai/docs/app-attribution

[mike_hearn]

This paper says they classify it by feeding tokens to a Google model.

[Windchaser]

I strongly bet that this is it.

[KronisLV]

Would be good to look into those particular statistics, then. Seems like the category could include all sorts of stuff:

> This indicates that users turn to open models primarily for creative interactive dialogues (such as storytelling, character roleplay, and gaming scenarios) and for coding-related tasks. The dominance of roleplay (hovering at more than 50% of all OSS tokens) underscores a use case where open models have an edge: they can be utilized for creativity and are often less constrained by content filters, making them attractive for fantasy or entertainment applications. Roleplay tasks require flexible responses, context retention, and emotional nuance - attributes that open models can deliver effectively without being heavily restricted by commercial safety or moderation layers. This makes them particularly appealing for communities experimenting with character-driven experiences, fan fiction, interactive games, and simulation environments.

I could imagine something like D&D or other types of narrative adventures on demand with a machine that never tires of exploring subplots or rewriting sections to be a bit different is a pretty cool thing to have. Either that, or writing fiction, albeit hopefully not entire slop books that are sold, but something to draw inspiration from and do a back and forth.

In regards to NSFW stuff, a while back people were clowning on OpenAI for suggesting that they'd provide adult writing content to adults, but it might as well be a bunch of money that's otherwise left on the table. Note: I'm all for personal freedom, though one also has to wonder about the longer term impact of those "AI girlfriend/boyfriend" trends, you sometimes see people making videos about those subreddits. Oh well, not my place to judge.

Edit: oh hey, there is more data there after all

> Among the highest-volume categories, roleplay stands out for its consistency and specialization. Nearly 60% of roleplay tokens fall under Games/Roleplaying Games, suggesting that users treat LLMs less as casual chatbots and more as structured roleplaying or character engines. This is further reinforced by the presence of Writers Resources (15.6%) and Adult content (15.4%), pointing to a blend of interactive fiction, scenario generation, and personal fantasy. Contrary to assumptions that roleplay is mostly informal dialogue, the data show a well-defined and replicable genre-based use case.

[sysguest]

"act as a senior xxx expert with over 15 years of industry experience"

... I just don't get why LLMs are affected by this kind of nonsense -- is it due to training rewards?

[mondojesus]

The way I think about it, the training data (i.e. the internet) has X% of people asking something like "explain it to me like I'm five years old" and Y% of people framing it like "I'm technical, explain this to me in detail". You use the "act as a senior XXX" when you want to bias the output towards something more detailed.

[est]

imagine how to prepare for an interview? Act confident lol

[bakugo]

> I guess that also selects for people who would use openrouter

It definitely does. OpenRouter is pretty popular among roleplayers and creative writers due to having a wide variety of models available, sometimes providing free access to quality models such as DeepSeek, and lacking any sort of rules against generating "adult" content.

[djfergus]

Openrouter has an apps tab. If you look at the free, non-coding models, some apps that feature are: janitor.ai, sillytavern, chub.ai. I'd never heard of them but people seem to be burning millions of tokens enjoying them.

[raincole]

If you rely on AI to write most of your code (instead of using it like Stackoverflow), Claude Code/OpenAI Codex subscription are cheaper than buying tokens. So those users are not on openrouter.

[djfergus]

I'm curious what percentage of claude/codex users this is true for - I assumed their business models rely on this not being true for the majority.

[bakugo]

Both Claude Code and Codex steer you towards the monthly subscription. Last time I tried Codex, I remember several aspects of it being straight up broken if used with an API key instead of a subscription account.

The business model is likely built upon the assumption that most people aren't going to max out their limits every day, because if they were, it likely wouldn't be profitable.

[UltraSane]

I got $250 free Claude Code credit and I was surprised by how hard it was to actually use it all before it expired.

[veunes]

I'm not surprised. Roleplay means endless sessions with huge context (character history, world, previous dialogues). On commercial APIs (OpenAI/Anthropic), that long-context costs a fortune. On OpenRouter, many OSS models, especially via providers like DeepInfra or Fireworks, cost pennies or are even free, like some Free-tier models. The RP community is very price-sensitive, so they massively migrate to cheap OSS models via aggregators. It skews the stats but highlights a real niche for cheap inference

[ceroxylon]

That also stuck out for me, I was wondering if it was video games using openrouter for uptime / inference switching, video games would use a lot of tokens generating dialogue for a few programmer's villages.

[cess11]

Sex- and spambots are likely the most common applications of these things.

[lm28469]

I'm not surprised at all. The HN crowd think LLMs are mostly used for engineering because they live in a multi layer bubble. Real people in the real world do all kind of shit with LLMs which aren't productivity or even work related.